These 3 Cognitive Biases Will Kill Innovation
If you want to innovate consistently, you need to keep confirmation bias in check
Remember New Coke, Coca-Cola’s new-and-improved Coke recipe launched in the mid-’80s? It seemed like a great idea at first: The new formula tested well among consumers and even had some initial success in the market.
Yet what the marketers at Coca-Cola missed is that many consumers had a strong emotional attachment to the old formula, which ended up creating a huge backlash. What started as a good idea — updating and rebranding a century-old drink — ended up backfiring because it addressed a problem that didn’t exist in the first place and ignored decades of ingrained brand loyalty.
When it comes to strategy and innovation, we always like to think we’ve done our homework and that we’ve based our ideas on only the most pertinent insights, but that’s often not the case. We tend to only see what we want to see and then protect our ideas by ignoring or explaining away facts that don’t fit that pattern. In particular, we need to learn to identify and avoid the three cognitive biases that kill innovation.
1. Availability bias
It’s easy to see where the marketers at Coca-Cola went wrong. They had done extensive market testing…
